Where The Fence Is The Highest (2019)

Teis Semey

Teis Semey

Where The Fence is the Highest is the two suite full-length debut album of Danish guitarist Teis Semey. Featuring two bands of natural-born improvisers, it’s a tight vortex of musicianship, virtuosity and story-telling. Through these two suites this album tells compelling and diverse stories that moves and stays with you.

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Teis Semey

Teis Semey (1993) is a guitar player and composer based in Amsterdam. Teis has played live in top venues such as Bimhuis (NL), Muziekgebouw (NL), Tivoli Utrecht and Like A Jazz Machine (LUX). Teis is known for an energetic way of playing, and "is not afraid of taking risks", as the Jury of Princess Christina Concours said after he won the 1st prize in 2014. Teis also won the Best Coltrane Arrangement award in the Keep An Eye Jazz Awards 2017 and 2nd prize in Leidse Jazz Competition, in which the jury had this to say:

"Teis is a soloist who serves the band as a whole. Interesting rhythmical shifts and creative concepts. The complexity fortunately never detracts from the playfulness of the band. Good arrangements of the pieces that develop as they go on. The stories that Teis tells on his guitar will only become stronger and stronger in the course of time."

Teis´ music is reminiscent of a wide range of artists; Dmitri Shostakovich, Morton Feldman and Arvo Pärt as much as John Coltrane, Reinier Baas, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Charlie Parker. Present in the music is a constant friction of improvisation and form, allowing and daring his fellow musicians to bloom through the compositions, making the music slide effortlessly back and forth between improvisation and composition.

photo: from artist's website 'about'

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Where The Fence Is The Highest (2019)

Teis Semey

Teis Semey

All About Jazz

Where the Fence Is the Highest consists of two multi-part suites. "Japan Suite" opens with a wordless lament sung by singer Fuensanta Méndez Lecomte that sets the tone for the subsequent sections. Structured around the progress of the seasons, and inspired by the historical European encounter with Japan in the 19th century that was expressed as "Japonism" in the visual arts, the four sections evoke the changing moods of summer, fall, winter and spring, in subtle shadings of harmony and dynamics. In "Winter," pianist Xavi Torres builds an current of tension under vocalist Méndez's plaintive text recital. As Temey's guitar and Nicoló Ricci's tenor sax weave counter-lines against the piano, that musical tension—a kind of suspended motion—is dispelled when, in "Spring," the melody returns, just as the season of renewal returns the sun to an ice-bound landscape. The collective arising of the ensemble, brings "Japan Suite" to a joyous conclusion.
In his guitar part writing, Semey integrates the instrument fully into the ensemble. As a soloist, he values tone production and coherence of melodic lines over flashy technical displays and virtuoso gestures. Soloing only briefly at the opening and closing of the "Japan Suite" opens more space for pianist Torres and saxophonist Ricci. Semey is an accomplished player, and his willingness to play inside, rather than over, the ensemble, affirms a musical maturity. There are echoes of guitar luminaries Jim Hall, John Abercrombie and Terje Rypdal in Semey's solos, and some similarity of intention to the Brad Shepik album Human Activity Suite on Songlines.